Donnie Brock, chairman of the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Board, is glad to be working as a full-time attorney again.
Over the course of a full, stormy year, Brock wasn't sure what to call his job title. The phone book listed him as an attorney, but he also was acting as the life-support system for the Industrial Board, which was drifting without an executive director at the helm.
"We had gone without a director for over a year, and there was just a lot of slack to be taken up," said Brock.
"Without a professional director, it's very difficult to keep everything in line."
Despite continued job losses and plant closings, the board was keeping the industrial community afloat, with the help of the arrival of Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp., but that's about it, he said.
Then came Robert Ingram, who ceded a position at the University of Southern Mississippi in October to fill the director's vacancy.
"This has allowed me to stay in my office a lot more," Brock said.
But more than Brock's place in the legal community has been restored since Ingram's arrival. Following the deflating failure of a fierce collective effort to bring a major helicopter manufacturer to the area, a school of prospective industries is once again circling the county, both leaders say.
"We have companies that are looking at almost every available manufacturing building in the city," Ingram said. "That doesn't mean any of them are going to happen, but it hasn't been too long ago that we didn't have anything going on."
Ingram is fervently optimistic about an economic situation that still doesn't seem to leave much room for optimism. "I'm probably having as much fun as I had in college," he says. "And that's saying a lot."
He moved to a community that has lost seven manufacturing operations and almost 3,000 jobs in three years. He commonly utters a statistic estimating that Greenwood is one of the leading contributors to the Delta's 6 million square feet in manufacturing space that currently lies dormant.
But look on the bright side, he says. "Viking's growth and Milwaukee Tool coming in thankfully have absorbed most of those losses. If you think about if we didn't have those losses, this community would be competing with the Gulf Coast, Jackson, Meridian and Tupelo."
Ingram says his elan flows from Greenwood residents' feverish loyalty to their hometown, a vibe he felt when he came here that is doing a lot of his work for him. He doesn't have to go fishing for companies, he said.
Referrals come to him from the populace.
"Most of the ones we're talking to have not come through the state or any utility," he said. "That's a critical part of economic development that a lot of communities do badly."
Brock says that volunteerism is embodied in the grandest contribution of all from one of Greenwood's corporate citizens. The Alluvian hotel, which Viking Range Corp. plans to open in about a month, will be an ace for sparking activity everywhere from downtown to the edges of the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Park, he said.
"The Alluvian is going to be a really good recruiting tool. Outside Jackson, I don't know of anywhere else in the state with a nice boutique hotel."
As the hotel nears completion, other, less visible changes are taking place.
Ingram's approach emphasizes education. That focus must begin with the community embracing Mississippi Valley State University, he said, which he calls "a rough-cut diamond."
With the appointment of Dr. Lester C. Newman, Valley's
president, to the Industrial Board last year, Ingram believes the time for that relationship has come.
"If we can get the community behind Mississippi Valley and accept it as our university - with us attending their events and getting them involved in our community - it could be a major source of income.
"We can't look at it as Itta Bena's university. It's Leflore County's university. It's the university of all the surrounding counties."
The Industrial Board also is partnering with Greenwood Public Schools to bring in a program, just the second in the state, that will prepare students to enter advanced technology-related education or go directly into the job market.
"The model was developed five years ago, and it has pretty much been perfected," Ingram said.
That program will be designed to feed students into a growing industrial community centered around Greenwood-Leflore Airport. Even with the loss of American Eurocopter last fall, the city and county are still very interested in aviation and aerospace technology.
Plans for an AvTech school at the airport, drawn up separately from the Eurocopter package but certainly part of it, have not been scrapped.
In the meantime, the Industrial Board has hired LockwoodGreene, a major consulting firm, to conduct a $60,000 study seeking gaps in the aviation field nationwide. Development leaders will use the results to build what the industry wants right here in the county.
The state still promises to eventually commit $4 million for the school, and the study will exact that promise.
"This study will be our proof to get the money," Brock explained. "We'll show them the need. We'll have the curriculum designed. Then, we'll immediately target companies."
LockwoodGreene assisted the rush to recruit Eurocopter, an effort Ingram says has earned the Leflore County area a reputation as a big player with consultants and industries.
"LockwoodGreene knows the effort that this community put into that, and they know the professionalism we'll put into this project," he said.
The Industrial Board is paying also for a G.I.S. study, which will produce topographical maps of the area, a key in recruiting.
These initiatives compose the board's long-range plan, ideas that are beginning to take root. Ingram and Brock know it will take time to get results - the jobs that so many people say are so badly needed - but they are confident in this vision for the future.
Besides, Brock says, even if new opportunities just trickle in, it's the quality of those positions that really matters.
"The new jobs we have created in the last three to four years are worth two of some we lost, because they pay well above the minimum wage," he said.
"They offer benefits the other companies didn't have with Social Security and retirement and other benefits that make for a better community."
